After examining Phaedra, we inevitably encounter an impression of familiarity in Andromache. Every author, even Shakespeare, has his own distinctive style. Thus in Andromache, as well as in Phaedra, love dominates the play, a love of a similar nature, imperious, uncontrollable, irrational, a disastrous emotion that leads to tragedy.
The literary formula is also familiar. Once again the curtain rises on a situation that is close to its climax. This necessitates a fairly lengthy exposition, deftly handled by the author in the first scene.
However Andromache (which incidentally was written before Phaedra) is emphatically not a variation on a theme. Subtle but significant differences distinguish it from Phaedra. Instead of a simple composition wherein the attention is focused on the protagonist and even prominent characters like Hippolytus are subordinated to the principal female role, that of Phaedra, Andromache presents a complex arrangement. The play suggests a dramatic dance, a quadrille in which each of the partners alternately leads the dance and forces the others to take a step. Orestes' mission compels Pyrrhus to make a decision about Andromache. She, in turn, will make a decision which will affect Hermione, who will then act and involve Orestes in her action.
The actions in Andromache are entirely psychologically motivated. In Phaedra, Racine removes and reintroduces Theseus as the plot requires. In Andromache, Orestes' embassy, which constitutes a similar external stimulus to the action, reveals itself on close examination to be of a different nature. Orestes' appearance in Epirus does not have the arbitrariness of Theseus' entrance into Athens. It is a predictable consequence of Pyrrhus' protection of Astyanax, son of Hector. It was quite plausible for the Greeks to send an embassy to deal with this potential threat to their safety. Orestes' place in that embassy is even less of an accident. He has taken it with the express intention of seeing Hermione again.
The poetic background, as compelling as the mythology in Phaedra, is, however, quite distinct in tone. In the latter play Racine adds depth and universality to an individual tragedy by working within Giraudoux's formula of the real within the unreal, enriching Phaedra's psychological struggle by allusions to the legendary world of the gods. In Andromache, he uses the Trojan War as background, but not only to add breadth and historic intensity to his psychological drama. The Trojan War here has the dreadful immediacy of any war, and the emotional struggle between Andromache and Pyrrhus is the prolongation of a war to the death between two races.
